Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019

It wasn’t until 1947 that their son broke through the rock and uncovered what was attached to the wooden handle — an iron-headed hammer. For close to four decades, the hammer remained a local oddity and relatively unknown, until it came to the attention of Carl Baugh, a Young Earth creationist after an article was published on the artifact in the Bible-Science Newsletter in 1983. Baugh was influential in a form of creationism which believes that Earth and all its forms of life were created by a deity’s supernatural acts 6000–10000 years ago. He promoted the hammer as proof of an antediluvian discovery, which remains in an exhibit at Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas.

Of equal interest to archaeologists, the London Hammer posed a scientific dilemma. What could possibly explain how a modern instrument was encased in ancient, prehistoric Ordovician rock from between 65–135 million years ago?

Continue reading “This Mysterious Hammer is Alleged to be Millions of Years Old” »

Circa 2017

Livescience.com | By LIVESCIENCE

During the Bronze Age, metal workers crafted daggers, axes and jewelry out of iron from outer space carried to Earth by meteorites.

Circa 2019 o.o!

A 3D-printed bunny contains tiny glass beads in which there are DNA-encoded instructions to replicate the rabbit, and they can still be read after nine months.

Cryopreservation, or the long-term storage of biomaterials at ultralow temperatures, has been used across cell types and species. However, until now, the practical cryopreservation of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)—which is crucial to genetics research and critical to scientific breakthroughs benefiting human health—has not been available.

“To keep alive the ever-increasing number of fruit flies with unique genotypes that aid in these breakthroughs, some 160000 different flies, laboratories and stock centers engage in the costly and frequent transfer of adults to fresh food, risking contamination and genetic drift,” said Li Zhan, a postdoctoral associate with the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering and the Center for Advanced Technologies for the Preservation of Biological Systems (ATP-Bio).

In new research published in Nature Communications, a University of Minnesota team has developed a first-of-its-kind method that cryopreserves fruit fly embryos so they can be successfully recovered and developed into adult insects. This method optimizes embryo permeabilization and age, cryoprotectant agent composition, different phases of nitrogen (liquid vs. slush), and post-cryopreservation embryo culture methods.

All brains shrink with age, and the dominant view has been that more education slows the rate of shrinking. However, the evidence has been inconclusive because studies have not been able to track the rate of change over time. Until now.

Measured brain shrinkage over time

A team of researchers measured brain aging by measuring the volume of the cortical mantle and hippocampus regions of the brain, in MRI scans from more than 2000 participants in the Lifebrain and UK biobanks. These areas of the brain are prone to shrinkage over time, as a natural part of aging. Participants’ brains were scanned up to three times over an 11 year period, in what is known as a ‘longitudinal’ study.

When the four-decades-old Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, scientists celebrated. These plucky spacecraft had already traveled 120 times the distance from the Earth to the sun to reach the boundary of the heliosphere, the bubble encompassing our solar system that’s affected by the solar wind. The Voyagers discovered the edge of the bubble but left scientists with many questions about how our Sun interacts with the local interstellar medium. The twin Voyagers’ instruments provide limited data, leaving critical gaps in our understanding of this region.

NASA and its partners are now planning for the next spacecraft, currently called the Interstellar Probe, to travel much deeper into interstellar space, 1000 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, with the hope of learning more about how our home heliosphere formed and how it evolves.

“The Interstellar Probe will go to the unknown local interstellar space, where humanity has never reached before,” says Elena Provornikova, the Interstellar Probe heliophysics lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Maryland. “For the first time, we will take a picture of our vast heliosphere from the outside to see what our solar system home looks like.”

The Bay Area has several famous landmarks that stand out from the Space Station.

The winter months in the San Francisco Bay area offer a reprieve from the typically foggy summer days that shroud the city and water beneath a layer of low clouds. On this clear December day, an astronaut onboard the International Space Station shot this photograph of the area’s mixture of dense urban development and preserved natural spaces.

The Bay Area has several famous landmarks that stand out to astronauts. The Golden Gate Bridge is part of Route 101, the longest highway in California; it connects the city of San Francisco to Marin County. The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge crosses over and tunnels through Yerba Buena Island. Both bridges stand high enough to allow large ships to pass under on the way to various docks, piers, and shipyards around the Bay.

Two-photon photoemission studies electrons deep in sample.

Virtual meetings that are a bit more meeting-like.

Zoom is rolling out a video background feature called Immersive View that could make video calls feel a bit more like an office meeting — or at least look a lot more like one. Zoom announced the feature last year at its Zoomtopia conference, but now it’s actually available for Free and Pro accounts attending meetings and webinars with up to 25 participants.

Immersive View builds on the virtual background features Zoom already has, but focuses on actually placing meeting attendees in a realistic-looking location, rather than just switching out a flat background. Meeting hosts can enable Immersive View from the same menu where you can find Speaker View and Gallery View; from there, Zoom will automatically place attendees in a variety of built-in virtual scenes like a board room or auditorium, or the meeting host can manually place them themselves.

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